“Mr. President,” I said, “may I introduce Jazzbow of Mars. Jazzbow, President Kennedy.”
The President just kept on staring. Jazzbow extended his right hand, that perpetual clown’s grin smeared across his face. With his jaw hanging open, Kennedy took it in his hand. And flinched.
“I assure you,” Jazzbow said, not letting go of the President’s hand, “that I am truly from Mars.”
Kennedy nodded. He believed it. He had to. Martians can make you see the truth of things. Goes with their telepathic abilities, I guess.
Schmidt explained the situation. How the Martians had built their canals once they realized that their world was dying. How they tried to bring water from the polar ice caps to their cities and farm lands. It worked, for a few centuries, but eventually even that wasn’t enough to save the Martians from slow but certain extinction.
They were great engineers, great thinkers. Their technology was roughly a century or so ahead of ours. They had invented the electric light bulb, for example, during the time of our French and Indian War.
By the time they realized that Mars was going to dry up and wither away despite all their efforts, they had developed a rudimentary form of space flight. Desperate, they thought that maybe they could bring natural resources from other worlds in the solar system to revive their dying planet. They knew that Venus, beneath its clouds, was a teeming Mesozoic jungle. Plenty of water there, if they could cart it back to Mars.
They couldn’t. Their first attempts at space flight ended in disasters. Of the first five saucers they sent toward Venus, three of them blew up on takeoff, one veered off course and was never heard from again, and the fifth crash-landed in New Mexico—which is a helluva long way from Venus.
Fortunately, their saucer crash-landed near a small astronomical station in the desert. A young graduate student—who eventually became Prof. Schmidt—was the first to find them. The Martians inside the saucer were pretty banged up, but three of them were still alive. Even more fortunately, we had something that the Martians desperately needed: the raw materials and manufacturing capabilities to mass-produce flying saucers for them. That’s where I had come in, as a tycoon of the aviation industry.
President Kennedy found his voice. “Do you mean to tell me that the existence of Martians—living, breathing, intelligent Martians—has been kept a secret since Nineteen Forty-six? More than fifteen years?”
“It’s been touch and go on several occasions,” said Schmidt. “But, yes, we’ve managed to keep the secret pretty well.”
“Pretty well?” Kennedy seemed disturbed, agitated. “The Central Intelligence Agency doesn’t know anything about this, for Christ’s sake!” Then he caught himself, and added, “Or, if they do, they haven’t told me about it.”
“We have tried very hard to keep this a secret from all the politicians of every stripe,” Schmidt said.
“I can see not telling Eisenhower,” said the President. “Probably would’ve given Ike a fatal heart attack.” He grinned. “I wonder what Harry Truman would’ve done with the information.”
“We were tempted to tell President Truman, but—”
“That’s all water over the dam,” I said, trying to get them back onto the subject. “We’re here to get you to call off this Project Apollo business.”
“But why?” asked the President. “We could use Martian spacecraft and plant the American flag on the moon tomorrow morning!”
“No,” whispered Jazzbow. Schmidt and I knew that when a Martian whispers, it’s a sign that he’s scared shitless.
“Why not?” Kennedy snapped.
“Because you’ll destroy the Martians,” said Schmidt, with real iron in his voice.
“I don’t understand.”
Jazzbow turned those big luminous eyes on the President. “May I explain it to you . . . the Martian way?”
I’ll say this for Jack Kennedy. The boy had guts. It was obvious that the basic human xenophobia was strong inside him. When Jazzbow had first touched his hand Kennedy had almost jumped out of his skin. But he met the Martian’s gaze and, not knowing what would come next, solemnly nodded his acceptance.
Jazzbow reached out his snaky arm toward Kennedy’s face. I saw beads of sweat break out on the President’s brow but he sat still and let the Martian’s tentacle-like fingers touch his forehead and temple.
It was like jumping a car battery. Thoughts flowed from Jazzbow’s brain into Kennedy’s. I knew what those thoughts were.
It had to do with the Martians’ moral sense. The average Martian has an ethical quotient about equal to St. Francis of Assisi. That’s the average Martian. While they’re only a century or so ahead of us technologically, they’re light-years ahead of us morally, socially, ethically. There hasn’t been a war on Mars in more than a thousand years. There hasn’t even been a case of petty theft in centuries. You can walk the avenues of their beautiful, gleaming cities at any time of the day or night in complete safety. And since their planet is so desperately near absolute depletion, they just about worship the smallest blade of grass.
If our brawling, battling human nations discovered the fragile, gentle Martian culture there would be a catastrophe. The Martians would be swarmed under, shattered, dissolved by a tide of politicians, industrialists, real estate developers, evangelists wanting to save their souls, drifters, grifters, con men, thieves petty and grand. To say nothing of military officers driven by xenophobia. It would make the Spanish Conquest of the Americas look like a Boy Scout Jamboree.
I could see from the look in Kennedy’s eyes that he was getting the message. “We would destroy your culture?” he asked.
Jazzbow had learned the human way of nodding. “You would not merely destroy our culture, Mr. President. You would kill us. We would die, all of us, very quickly.”
“But you have the superior technology . . . ”
“We could never use it against you,” said Jazzbow. “We would lay down and die rather than deliberately take the life of a paramecium.”
“Oh.”
Schmidt spoke up. “So you see, Mr. President, why this moon project has got to be called off. We can’t allow the human race en masse to learn of the Martians’ existence.”
“I understand,” he murmured.
Schmidt breathed out a heavy sigh of relief. Too soon.
“But I can’t stop the Apollo project.”
“Can’t?” Schmidt gasped.
“Why not?” I asked.
Looking utterly miserable, Kennedy told us, “It would mean the end of my administration. For all practical purposes, at least.”
“I don’t see—”
